Leaked Dell docs suggest Qualcomm's new laptop chips could deliver nearly twice the battery life of the latest Intel CPUs

A leaked internal presentation by Dell on its forthcoming laptop models continues to give up interesting nuggets, this time a slide notes that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processors are cheaper and less energy-hungry than all of Intel's recent chips, including Meteor Lake. So much so, that in some cases, battery life in equivalent laptops is extended by as much as 98%. And all that's done with chips that are half the price.

The Dell presentation in question also noted the split line between Intel and Qualcomm for its upcoming laptops, and was discovered by Videocardz just a few days ago. At over 300 pages in length, there was bound to be lots of juicy information. The first thing of note was Dell's plans to rapidly update its laptop models each year, with Intel's forthcoming range of architectures, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Dell has been testing various configurations of its laptops, comparing the energy consumption of Arm-based Snapdragon X chips to Intel's Alder Lake and Meteor Lake CPUs. On platforms sporting Qualcomm processors, local video playback (i.e. running a movie from the SSD) requires half the amount of power as an equivalent Alder Lake chip—a little over 21 hours of playback compared to just 11 hours on the Intel laptop.

It's a similar story for movie streaming and Qualcomm's chip was at least 68% better, in terms of battery life, compared to the best Alder Lake laptop. These figures tally with Qualcomm's claims of its chips being more energy efficient than Meteor Lake, with battery life being 40 to more than 100% longer than a Core Ultra 7 platform, depending on the application.

Processors based on the Arm architecture are well known for being very energy efficient, as they're often used in situations where low power consumption is an absolute necessity, such as in smartphones, embedded systems, and wearable devices. Qualcomm has years of experience in these sectors so it shouldn't come as a surprise that its Snapdragon X chips are just as